The True Lives of My Chemical Romance by Tom Bryant

Author:Tom Bryant [Bryant, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447253587
Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson

If ‘Famous Last Words’ got My Chemical Romance back on track musically, it did little to lift the intense mood. Midway through the sessions, Gerard broke up with his girlfriend. Cavallo remembers that the singer was screaming, saying his reaction to the split ‘actually manifested itself in physical agony’. It only increased the blackness and despair which was feeding the record. Several months after the album came out, Gerard opened up about it – nervously.

‘I have to approach this with kid gloves,’ he said, before taking the plunge. ‘I’d rather not get into too much detail about it, but I was alone for the first time in ten years. It was really hard. I was not used to it. I’ve had girlfriends since I was seventeen or eighteen. I was thinking, “Oh my God, who the fuck am I going to meet now?” But it makes the record make more sense to me. It makes it count a lot more.

‘It was a six-year relationship that ended. It was practically marriage,’ he continued. ‘It was with someone that knew me before all this and knew me before the band. Halfway through tracking – literally just when I had finished tracking the vocal parts and chorus line to “Famous Last Words” – I broke up with her. I realized the lines in there were the truth and that I wasn’t telling myself the truth any more. The record was so much about the truth that I knew I had to [end the relationship]. It was the hardest thing I had to do, harder than making the record. I had to fly back and talk to her. I had to move my stuff out. It was brutal.

‘She was fucking amazing. I loved her and she was awesome but she couldn’t deal with this. When I finally understood that I realized, “Wow, people can’t deal with this.”’

Already emotionally fragile, it made him even more of a mess as he recorded. He says the song ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ was also tracked in the middle of his relationship problems and he believes his state of mind bled into the music. Originally entitled ‘The Five of Us Are Dying’, and sketched out as early as sessions for the first album, it had evolved to the extent that only the verse survived. It went through revision after revision in the studio, a painstaking process of trial and error. Singing it, Gerard felt he was close to complete breakdown. ‘It felt like the pressure was tearing us up,’ he said. ‘It was the hardest song on the record to make. I was going through some very difficult personal things. I was literally going through them as we were tracking the song. Originally it was sort of a plea for help.’

My Chemical Romance definitely bled to make The Black Parade. They set aside one room in The Paramour Mansion and it became dubbed The Heavy Room. Inside it, they tore each other to shreds. They made a rule that they would be absolutely honest with each other in there, sometimes brutally so.

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